


this particular king. this particular man.

by waterfront



Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, mentions of Ersa, secret kisses and hiding from guards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:21:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27528349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waterfront/pseuds/waterfront
Summary: "It’s not as if she didn’t know the risks. She knew them and she kissed him anyway. She kissed him and she loved it. She had kissed a king and knew there would be repercussions. But despite her strategy, her planning, her willful disregard of the rules, she hadn’t counted on the reckoning that would come with this particular king. This particular man."Aloy realizes her time with Avad might be more dangerous than she originally thought.
Relationships: Aloy/Avad (Horizon: Zero Dawn)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 26





	this particular king. this particular man.

Never one for long-winded diatribes, Aloy stifles a yawn, one of many. 

Fortunately, High Priest Vaneth of the Third Order and Exalted Historian of the Buried Archives, does not seem to notice. He hasn’t noticed much, well into hour two of recounting Araman’s great conquest into the west. 

However, her curious partner — the pair of them wandering behind Vaneth — sees her glassy eyes, the bite of her lip to keep the yawn from escaping, and grins. 

“You know, it’s much more bearable if you can imagine him as a giant boar that’s learned to walk on its hind legs,” Avad whispers in her ear. 

They’re somewhere in the Lower Gardens, retracing the steps of his forebears as they mapped out the future of the Carja Sundom. It’s midday, meaning just about everything is hot, sticky, and dripping. Aloy feels a bead of sweat roll down the planes of her back as she glowers at the Sun King.

“This is the last time I trust you to take me on a ‘curious tour of the palace’,” she whispers back. 

Avad pretends to look offended. “I thought you’d enjoy learning about our noble history, Oh Seeker of Knowledge.”

“Right now, I’d enjoy shoving two hot pokers into my —,”

“Do you have a question, dear lady?” Vaneth stops and turns around, beady eyes looking down in genuine, glassy curiosity. His pudgy hands hold the Sacred Texts that they all know he hasn’t looked at since beginning the tour. 

“Oh. No.” Aloy shakes her head, unable to hide the blush that sprouts across her face. “Sorry. I — uh — I —,”

“She was just remarking on your exquisite storytelling, High Priest,” Avad interjects with a small bow. “Please, continue with your lesson.”

“Quite right.” Vaneth orbits back around and continues on in the same monotone as though no one had interrupted. 

Avad leaps to follow after him, if only to avoid Aloy’s elbow.

“That’s not funny, you—,”

Avad slips his hand over her mouth, grabs her by the waist, hauls her into the dark of a corridor, and around a corner to a smaller courtyard overlooking a green pond. 

He pins her to the wall and immediately his mouth finds hers. 

Any indignation she may have felt is burnt up in ashes and cinders as his hands and tongue find delights that have been ignored for too long.

He was like this sometimes — coming on like a strong sunburn and catching heat in places where it could hurt — but the intensity always surprised her. Always. Always always always. 

As if his restraint wasn’t worth it anymore. 

His fingers wrapped around her bicep holding her to the wall as if she would wriggle free, his lips carve their way from her lips, to her jaw, down to the sensitive patch of smooth skin below her ear. Somedays, he would coax that spot for hours on end, but not today — not while she wavered against the hot palace rocks, only feet away from prying guards and watchful advisors. 

His lips briefly exchange with his nose, breath filling up the space under her chin and her chest like a warm hand, before his mouth appears again, and Avad . . . _sucks_ her like a punctured peach. 

The noise she makes is high-pitched, keening — embarrassing and revealing and she digs her nails into his chest. It rocks a groan out of him and he presses himself against her. 

“ _Avad_ ,” she says because it’s the only thing she can think of. “Avad, Avad, Avad . . .”

If his mutterings are his response or because her hips pressed back, there was real no way to know. 

When he was like this, it was like nothing she had ever known.

His skin is feverish, running his hands up her neck and under her shirt, as if he — as if they both — had caught some errant virus that was burning them both from the inside out. 

Somewhere, in another part of the palace, a pair of guards clanks by and she swears they’re turning down the corridor to find their Sun King unrelentingly compromised. 

“Avad,” she murmurs, hands jerkily moving from his back up between them. “Avad, they’ll hear us. Vaneth will . . .”

“I’ve been avoiding Vaneth since I was sixteen years old,” he replies with a throaty chuckle that sends a rush of warm breath across her cheeks and makes her toes clench. “The palace could crumble around him and he would prattle on until he died from inhaling too much dust.” 

Every inch of her buzzes and itches as though she had run through a field of Wild Ember. Avad had become a feeling to chase, a high, an element she needed to breathe. 

Aloy giggles, clawing at this source, at him. It was dizzying, this flying. She runs her hand up against his jaw and plays with his lip with her thumb. 

“Have a little faith, Aloy,” Avad says, his eyes cycling through awe, lust, and excitement, “I know this palace like an intimate friend. I know where to hide. Besides, I’ve done this all before—,”

And just like that, the flying feels like falling. 

He can sense her stilling, her walls going back up. “Aloy, wait, I didn’t mean—,”

She wants to pull back, to run, to run to some place safe but as of late, he had been safe. “I think you did.” 

So he does the noble thing instead. Avad steps away, gives her room to find safety in her instinct to take flight. 

“Please, please, don’t take it that way — it’s not — _I didn’t mean it_.”

Aloy swallows this immutable thing in her throat, staring at his horrified face. 

“I know.” It sounds like she’s consoling him and she hates herself just a little bit.

“Please, Aloy, I’m not—,” he moves to take her hand but she is out of reach. 

“I need to go.” She’s halfway down the corridor. 

“Aloy—,” 

“I’ll find you later.” She’s gone.

* * *

It’s not as if she didn’t know the risks. She knew them and she kissed him anyway. She kissed him and she loved it. She had kissed a king and knew there would be repercussions. That was the way of the world — this give and take of fleeting things. She had wasted precious time solving the secrets of Zero Dawn to kiss and touch and hold the king of one of the most powerful tribes — so yes, there would be a reckoning. 

But despite her strategy, her planning, her willful disregard of the rules, she hadn’t counted on the reckoning that would come with this particular king. This particular man.

This particular man who was in love with a dead woman and her immaculate ghost. 

Aloy wasn’t petty enough to hate a dead woman, or even be jealous of her. Instead it was the boiling sense of inadequacy that made her want to run the length of the Sundom. And inadequacy was a feeling she was achingly acquainted with. She didn’t fit here because that place was already filled and there was no Proving here to make her worthy. 

A warm evening wind rushes in from the west and tousles her hair.

From her perch on top of the Hunter’s Lodge, she can see all of Meridian and the golden spires of the palace. Even late into the day, builders and pavers, Oseram and Carja alike, work to rebuild the walls around the city. The muffled voices are encouraging, supportive — their hard work had paid off and it was time to go home. 

Six months ago, a hurt like this would have sent her far into the wilds, into a battle with an unlucky Scrapper or a pack of red-eyed Watchers. But now, now after the Battle of the Alight, and defeating Hades, and finding Elisbet like she was still asleep — she stayed in Meridian because she had dinner plans. With Erend and Talanah, with a message from Varl to share. She has, unlike six months ago, a connection. A tether. 

But for the first time in six months, the tether felt more like a noose. 

Everywhere, it smelled of him and his spices and she felt like a fool for being sad. He was a king and kings didn’t stay with Nora savages.

He was Avad and he was still in love with Ersa. 

The wind dries her eyes and she wipes them, clearing out the dirt and red dust. 

“Aloy.”

There is a knock at the floor door that led up to the crow’s nest of the Hunter’s Lodge. Given that Talanah was the only other person who knew about this place, odds are her friend has come to collect her for dinner.

“Coming, Tala,” she calls and moves to stand. 

The door cracks a bit and Talanah looks out, her face full of shame. “Look, I know you told me you wanted to be alone, but he said he was really worried.”

The bottom of Aloy’s stomach drops out. 

Talanah moves aside and Avad appears, having the decency to wear a mute expression. 

“Your Radiancy.” It’s a stupid greeting but she can’t think of anything else to say. 

He nods.

Talanah’s gaze flashes between the pair, the gears in her quick mind whirling between situations and outcomes. Aloy has told her nothing of her meetings with Avad, but the truth feels inevitable. 

“I’m gonna head to dinner with Erend,” she says slowly. Avad still won’t look anywhere else but Aloy. “Aloy, you come when you’re ready.

“Sun King.” She bows, sending one more confused look to Aloy. There are only a few reasons a king himself would come to call on a lonely huntress and what he has done is irresponsible and dangerous. People would talk. 

But not Talanah. She bows again before backing out of the door and shutting it with a definitive click. 

The moment stretches and neither says anything. She feels like being petulant, as if she could hold some sort of leverage over him. Over a king. 

Aloy leans back against the wooden railing of the perch and squints into the sun. 

“People will talk,” she says, as if that’s the biggest of their worries. 

Avad goes to the railing and wraps his hands around it. “I know,” he says. 

“You’re either here to apologize or explain yourself. So get on with it.” She says curtly. 

Avad sighs, swallows. “What do you want to hear? An apology or an explanation?”

Like he was some baby fox she had rudely kicked over. 

“I want you to mean what you say!” She snaps. The falling feels like running. “I want to believe you when you say you’ve moved on. I want you to look me in the eyes and tell me this is something different and I want to believe it with every ounce of my being. I can’t keep chasing ghosts, Avad. I can’t keep just being used in place of the real thing!”

She had told him about Elisbet, about GAIA recreating her own maker for a purpose the AI never got to explain. Aloy was only here because she was a copy of an ancient woman a machine had loved. You have two mothers, Sylens once said. Too often it felt like she was an imprint of a memory not fully formed. 

Inadequate. 

She had told him about all of it and this was an intimate wound that would never heal.

“You are not being _used_.” He says softly, not looking at her. “I promise you.”

In a voice that sounds very much like Helis, Aloy thinks _liar_. 

As though he had heard, Avad turns his head towards her, his eyes on hers and says, very slowly: “ _I promise you._ ”

She is disgusted by how much she wants to forgive him. How much she wants to go back to the courtyard. To be pinned beneath him. Ridiculously, it was simpler there. 

“What I said was cruel and stupid.” He begins. “And thoughtless. As someone who cares for you very much, I would do anything to take back the implication of my words.” 

“But you weren’t wrong. You had been there before. With other girls. With Ersa. I’m picking up threads on a story you’ve already had years in the making —,”

“Aloy,” he says and she stops. He scratches between his eyes with the knuckle of his thumb before taking a small step towards her. 

He knows how spooked she is. How given a single scent of deception or falsehoods, she would run. He knows and he’s doing everything he physically can not to reach out and touch her. He hasn’t earned that yet.

“I’m only going to say this once.” Avad clears his throat and looks so intently into her eyes the world seems to be sucked through a pinprick. “What I feel for you is nothing like what Ersa and I had.”

There’s a crack somewhere within her and she can only respond with, “terrible way to phrase that sentence.”

He takes a deep breath and tries again. “She came on slowly . . . and surprised me. But the moment you walked into the throne room, Aloy . . . by the Sun, I felt like I had been struck by lightning.” 

Twilight was turning the light purple and hazy. Aloy crosses her arms and looks out to the city, more lamp lights twinkling the farther the sun sets. 

“We have to hide because of who I am. Because of what I am to these people. I am the Sun King and anything that resembles me acting on my human impulses . . . I have to hide. Ersa and I hid everything, and whatever it is you want from me, from us, we must hide. It was not Ersa I was remembering, it’s this sense of . . . _imprisonment._ ”

“Poor little royal,” she snaps with more poison than she feels. “How difficult it must be for you, to have a stream of women you have to fuck in the dark. All to keep playing the role of master over these people—,”

“These _peopl_ e think. I. am. _a god_ ,” he hisses. 

Avad’s golden eyes blaze with such earnest the fight in her mouth dies and for a single moment, she thinks he’s going to scream. He wants her to understand — no, he’s begging her to understand. Pleading. 

“And gods,” he says, voice choked, “ _gods are not allowed to fall in love_. 

“Ersa and I had to hide everything,” Avad swallows and glances out to the city, his eyes bright and swimming, “and in some ways, I think that’s what got her killed. She was punished for my transgression.”

This was something he had never said to anyone else, perhaps not even himself during waking hours. This was the face of absolute conviction, of rotting guilt. 

She had been allowed to reject the Nora’s religious sanctification. But perhaps others bonds were not as easily broken. 

“And, if I haven’t been exceptionally clear,” he says, turning back to her, to her corner of the perch where she has pulled up all walls as close as they could come, “I cannot and will not allow that to happen to you.”

It’s absurd, really, what he’s saying. What he’s trying to say. What’s trying to make her believe. 

“Avad, you’re not going to be punished for kissing me,” she says, joking, as if that’s all he meant. 

The look he gives her is fearful that she misunderstood him, but she can’t bear the thought of returning his gaze with the full implications of the things he won’t say.

“I know,” he says softly. “I know.”

So maybe she’s not ready to hear it. Definitely not ready to say it. But he’s practically bursting with it, so she smiles gently.

“If you don’t believe me, come find out for yourself.”

He comes to her because he can’t do anything else — she knows that now about him. Maybe he’s watching her with such sad eyes because he knows she knows and that’s as far as she can go. But when he slips his fingers up under her jaw, trailing gently to the back of her neck, bends his head down and kisses her, there is no sour taste of sadness. 

He breathes deep, inhaling as though apologizing to her smell for not being there to be enraptured by it, and his other hand rests on her waist. She loops her arms around his neck and their bodies notch together. 

The last of the sunlight fades, erupting in the horizon with burnt oranges and bruised purples. She is as elemental to him as he is to her. Maybe the fates would be kind to them and this time would be different. Maybe she could fall in love at her own speed and maybe this time he could keep what made him so exquisitely happy. 

Maybe.

Maybe.

Maybe. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm circling the HZD drain again and this time, captaining a completely different ship. There's something very sexy about italics so I definitely overused them here, but :shrug:
> 
> I originally intended to post this as part of a multichapter fic with the VERY loose thread of plot centering around Aloy and Avad. But I wrote this is a wild haze last night and really enjoyed how it turned out. I'll probably update and organize this with other chapters once I figure out wtf I'm doing with these drabbles. But until then enjoy!


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